Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Tonitrus]

Incidentally, what's with meatpacking plans that make them so much more vulnerable than other industries?

From what I've been able to find, it would seem that they tend to have very close/right working conditions and a culture of compelling workers to show up for work even when sick.

[jimmy olsen]

 

https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1274133823031316481

Wow. A nursing home in Baltimore, oldest African-American one,  did not lose *a single person* to COVID because as soon as they heard Trump say cases would soon go to zero, they realized it was going to be a catastrophe, stopped visits and masked up.

[The Larch]

Incidentally, what's with meatpacking plans that make them so much more vulnerable than other industries?

From what I've been able to find, it would seem that they tend to have very close/right working conditions and a culture of compelling workers to show up for work even when sick.

Yeah, it's a combination of long working hours, cramped work conditions and being in a low temperature environment, added to the fact that many of the employees have really basic health coverage and would rather work sick than lose a day of work.

[Monoriu]

A fifth person died of COVID 19 in Hong Kong today. 

[Legbiter]

Here we've been screening all incoming travelers for about a week now. We always, every day, find 1 or 2 active infections from asymptomatic carriers.  The virus is very widespread out there. We'd rekindle a general local pandemic almost instantly if precautions were not in place. The only locals with an active infection now are the 3 police officers from dealing with those Romanian thieves a little while back.

[Syt]

"When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases. So I said slow the testing down."
—Trump on trying to keep the number of reported COVID cases low https://t.co/DK2m3qYJ5J

[Valmy]

Bullshit over results every time.

[Zanza]

Incidentally, what's with meatpacking plans that make them so much more vulnerable than other industries?

From what I've been able to find, it would seem that they tend to have very close/right working conditions and a culture of compelling workers to show up for work even when sick.

Yeah, it's a combination of long working hours, cramped work conditions and being in a low temperature environment, added to the fact that many of the employees have really basic health coverage and would rather work sick than lose a day of work.

In Germany, you can add that virtually all the workers are foreigners living in shabby poor hygiene accommodation with high density and often don't understand the hygiene rules.

The massive 1000+ cases outbreak in a German meatpacking plant seems to have no major transmission to the population at large as the workers live and work rather isolated.

[Admiral Yi]

"When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases. So I said slow the testing down."
—Trump on trying to keep the number of reported COVID cases low https://t.co/DK2m3qYJ5J

What's amazing is that this is not even noteworthy any more.

[Sheilbh]

Someone on Twitter pointed out this sort of feels like gun violence at this point. The US has basicaly accepted a far higher rate as tolerable than any other country. Now we're moving into the "'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" territory.

Edit: Also listened to an audio-essay by Matt d'Ancona - I don't think I'd realised quite how much covid-19 hit the government. In late March/early April the list of people self-isolating and ill is insane - the PM and then in hospital, his chief of staff who is 70, his chief policy advisor (albeit by travelling halfway across the country); Matt Hancock (his and Johnson's test results came on the same day - apparently this was unplanned, they'd got tested without telling each other and Hancock only found out about Johnson when he got a notification), the Chief Medical Officer, several members of his team; Michael Gove and Rishi Sunak were both self-isolating at different points; and Sir Mark Sedwill who is the head of the civil service.

Apparently they could all see Johnson was unwell before he was tested so were trying to get him to make as many decisions as possible. But our system is very informal on this stuff - there's no set out order of succession or way of dealing with this like a VP position or the 25th amendment.

[alfred russel]

Someone on Twitter pointed out this sort of feels like gun violence at this point. The US has basicaly accepted a far higher rate as tolerable than any other country. Now we're moving into the "'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" territory.

That is a dumb statement. In terms of number of dead per million of population, the US is at 373, while some significant countries are considerably higher - the UK for instance is at 641.

In terms of cases detected, the US has run 28,075,798 tests. The UK is actually probably doing better there with 7,890,145, but France is way down at 1,384,633.

Is the US a best practice leader? Probably not, but the response has hardly been a catastrophic world outlier.

[alfred russel]

A lot of you are blinded by politics.

For example, is Brazil a disaster? The reported deaths there per million stand at 239. That is less than the US and way less than half a lot of major European countries. Maybe the data is unsound, in which case who knows what is happening. Is it leading to political instability there? Yes--but that is a separate topic.

One of the reported items that should be creating a ton of skepticism is Florida--there have been consistent stories since March about how the governor in Florida is fucking stuff up. Recently cases have been reported to be spiking. Maybe they are and this is the moment Florida really will descend into a death spiral. But deaths per million stand at 147, which is less than the national average. It is in line with California, which is at 139 and has a similar climate. To put things in perspective, Florida has had 3,164 deaths. New York has had 31,174. Florida is the state with more people.

The Florida data doesn't prove the governor is a genius, but the obvious question is why the results haven't matched expectations. If it is climate, the climate in Florida is cool in March--it seems even northern locations could follow that lead in the summer. If it isn't climate, then maybe the advice to lock everything down was misguided at the start. There are other possibilities too of course, but rather than continuously predicting that the sky will fall on Florida, those seem worth exploring.

[Sheilbh]

That is a dumb statement. In terms of number of dead per million of population, the US is at 373, while some significant countries are considerably higher - the UK for instance is at 641.

In terms of cases detected, the US has run 28,075,798 tests. The UK is actually probably doing better there with 7,890,145, but France is way down at 1,384,633.

Is the US a best practice leader? Probably not, but the response has hardly been a catastrophic world outlier.

Sure. I mean I'm not saying the US is a catastrophic world outlier (yet) - but from a distance it seems to be the only country that's effectively given up trying to control this. I've said before but lockdown isn't a policy, it's a really blunt tool when your policy fails which gives you time or space to basically go back to the beginning where the infection is under control.

So Europe had some of the worst outbreaks in the world, but generally lockdown worked and in most countries there's no far more testing capacity (France is an outlier on this) and contact tracing. In theory as lockdown eases it'll be possible to identify cases and clusters and stop them spreading. I think this is present even in countries that never fully locked down like Sweden or Switzerland. I think there's similar infrastructure in most Asian countries.

So what is the US strategy, or even state-level strategies for controlling infection rates? Because from a distance it just seems like the US is accepting bigger risk and (assuming European efforts work as well as Asian ones) probably a higher death rate than normal for the next, what, 3-15 months until we get a vaccine.

A lot of you are blinded by politics.

For example, is Brazil a disaster? The reported deaths there per million stand at 239. That is less than the US and way less than half a lot of major European countries. Maybe the data is unsound, in which case who knows what is happening. Is it leading to political instability there? Yes--but that is a separate topic.

How can you separate out the politics? If a government's response to a crisis leads to serious talk of a military coup and mass protests I think it's fair to say it's been a disaster.

For me the bigger worry is we've almost seen these waves of deaths in different locations. So it was Asia first, then Europe, then the US. Now the centre seems to be Latin America - about 50% of global daily deaths are in Latin America at the minute (Mexico is also increasing a lot - AMLO's response has not been impressive). We're starting to see a big increase in deaths in India too, so there may be a wave there and, then, there'll probably be another wave in Africa.

I've said before I don't know that lockdown is a solution that can work in the developing world, there may also be lower state capacity and resources to deal with this type of pandmic. So I don't know what happens there.

One of the reported items that should be creating a ton of skepticism is Florida--there have been consistent stories since March about how the governor in Florida is fucking stuff up. Recently cases have been reported to be spiking. Maybe they are and this is the moment Florida really will descend into a death spiral. But deaths per million stand at 147, which is less than the national average. It is in line with California, which is at 139 and has a similar climate. To put things in perspective, Florida has had 3,164 deaths. New York has had 31,174. Florida is the state with more people.

The Florida data doesn't prove the governor is a genius, but the obvious question is why the results haven't matched expectations. If it is climate, the climate in Florida is cool in March--it seems even northern locations could follow that lead in the summer. If it isn't climate, then maybe the advice to lock everything down was misguided at the start. There are other possibilities too of course, but rather than continuously predicting that the sky will fall on Florida, those seem worth exploring.

The point with Florida (and California) is that they're both seeing a spike in the number of positives as a % of tests - so it's not about case numbers on their own. Florida is a bit clearer because they've got better data. But they're been over 10% of tests coming back positive. That's roughly where they were before lockdown. If you're at that sort of level then it feels like it's spreading in the community and is out-pacing your capacity to monitor it.

But they're also leading indicators. There have been reports of a spike in cases before - but normally your very good point is true, it's because there's more testing. The reason I'm flagging Florida, Arizona, Texas and California at the minute is the new case numbers are outpacing testing and that's more of a concern. As I say that's more of a sign that it's spinning out of control again. It may be that there's context that explains this, but from what I understand IFR seems fairly consistent across the survey studies done in China and Europe and the US, so it feels like if there's widespread new cases coming in, we're going to have increasing hospitalisation in the next fortnight and that'll feed into death figures down the line. I don't see any reason why Florida or California would be different.

And obviously when looking at deaths we need to look at the excess deaths for this period. Because that will capture the undiagnosed and the sort-of indirect deaths which are all caused by this disease.

Also I don't think New York's the best comparison because NYC has had one of the worst outbreaks in the world. I think in Europe only Bergamo (which has about 100,000 people in it) was worse hit - I think the excess deaths there was over 400%. In NYC it was over 300% which is about the same as Guayaquil in Ecuador (again with a smaller population), I think the nearest to that is then Lima. London, Madrid and I think Milan all saw their excess deaths go up by 100-150%, which I think is around the same for New Jersey. New York is a really extreme outbreak, like Bergamo (I don't know why for either - I assume there was bigger spread before anyone realised what was happening?), so I'm not sure it's a useful comparsion point.

[Josquius]

I do wonder whether the US just isn't recording some corona deaths.

[jimmy olsen]

I do wonder whether the US just isn't recording some corona deaths.

I posted a link on this last week. There were an average of 3600 "mystery" death in the two last weeks or May.